WordPress Hosting - what to do before your blog goes viral

So you're working hard at creating amazing content for your blog. But what will happen when you'll get thousands of hits/ day because you've finally managed to attract the readers you were hoping for? My guess is that if your blog is not hosted on a solid server, it'll crash and you'll end up with thousands of frustrated wannabe readers. So I guess that this is a question all of us bloggers must ask:

How to choose the right WordPress
hosting solution for my website or blog?

Googling “WordPress Hosting” will get you results that span all sorts of price ranges and technical specs. This post will cut through the noise and help you choose the right hosting for
your sites.

I’m going to go through and detail out the
choices that you have when you choose a hosting plan for your WordPress blog.

There are 4 basic types of
hosting accounts to choose from:

• Shared Hosting

• VPS (Virtual Private Server)

• Dedicated Hosting

• Managed Hosting

And that there are 6 major factors to
consider when you’re choosing a host:

• Speed

• Security

• Scalability

• Support

• Tools

• Price

Ask yourself: Which type of hosting suits my needs
best?

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is a common hosting
solution. It’s most compelling feature is price.

Shared hosting is cheap. For less than $10/
month you share a single server’s resources with a few hundred other small
sites. If price is the most important factor, shared hosting is the way to go.

The downsides are that pages will take
several seconds to load, and you’ll be responsible for keeping your site secure
and updated from hackers and malware. And if you get a spike in traffic because
your blog goes viral, there is a high risk that the site may crash.

Virtual Private Server

A VPS gives you more control over your site
for development, along with more server resources, since you’re only sharing
the server with a few other sites and not hundreds.

A VPS account can handle higher loads of
traffic than a shared hosting account.

Choosing the right hosting for YOUR
WordPress blog!

You’ll pay a bit more money for a VPS,
$20-$100+ (depending on the storage) for the extra control and resources. And
the server will be pretty beefy, so it can handle some significant traffic.
However, scalability is limited to that server. Once the server runs out of
processing power, either because of your traffic load, or maybe your neighbor
suddenly got an influx of traffic, your site’s performance will drop as a
result.

If you’re running a VPS, because you’ve got
more control over the server, please make sure you are performing your own
security measures to prevent hacking. You’ll receive pretty good support, but
the folks you call or email won’t be able to offer much help if you get hacked,
or if your site goes down.

Dedicated Server

This is the solution you’ll want if you
need absolute control over all the technical aspects of hosting your sites. But
you, or your SysAdmin better know the difference between Apache and Nginx, and
being familiar with object caching. And someone on your team needs to know
their way around a MySQL database, as well as how to maintain your own security
protocol and firewall.

Dedicated servers give you a whole server,
or several, for you to work with. Depending on how you set things up, your site
will be extremely scalable under high traffic loads, and you’ll be able to hand-tune
the performance and scalability. Dedicated servers are more expensive than a
VPS: right at $250-$300 to start. It’s a bit more expensive, but it’s a good
solution for websites that you want complete control over.

Managed WordPress Hosting

This elite breed of hosting is the top of
the line for speed and scalability, and it also assumes that your site is
running on WordPress. That’s a safe assumption, since about 20% of the Internet
is built on WordPress. Managed WordPress Hosting means that a company like WP
Engine takes care of all the technical details of the hosting and makes sure
that your WordPress site is served quickly, usually under a second, and that
speed scales with high traffic loads. So if (and when!) you get featured on the
New York Times or your blog goes viral, you’ll be able to handle all the traffic.

WP Engine will also manage the security for
you, and automatically update WordPress when the latest version is released. Knowing that your site is being cared for by WordPress hosting specialist means
that you don’t have to worry about hackers or security. WP Engine even
guarantees their security. No other Managed Host has the guarantee.

One of the biggest benefits is having
expert support when it matters most. Managed hosts have support staff who know
not only hosting, but they know WordPress as well, and can offer help in troubleshooting issues with plugins or themes.

If you think that your blog will start having success, WP Engine is the way to go.

WP Engine also provides tools like a
staging area and automatic nightly backups of your site in case you ever need
to restore your site. They also have git for version control.